[acaciapalm]

I am glad she mentioned how awful it is to have only one female employee.

I was the only woman in an office. One of my co workers made a pretty horrific comment (not about me, but about women in front of me). Someone went to HR and we had sensitivity training...but everyone assumed it was me because I was the only woman. Maybe I SHOULD have gone to HR, but I didn't want to because I feared being the obvious complainant. Which I ended up getting the side-eye for anyway.

I realized I would much rather work somewhere with at least 2 other women.

[colmvp]

I'm not sure how much this has to do with quantity of x as opposed to quality of x.

I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism.

I've also worked in teams where it's been highly diverse in ethnicity though not gender, and again, never noticed any hints of sexism.

Though I have certainly worked in a company with a number of women, including a female co-founder/CEO who was absolutely sexist... against women. I'm not suggesting women are bad CEO's or that diversity is bad, I'm saying that from my experience, it hasn't been about the diversity of the team so much as the type of people in the composition.

Also from my POV, I'm not sure how having a random % of women makes more or less sense than a random % of black people or Latino's. Like if a company is predominantly composed of white men, does adding a white female make it more diverse than adding a black man?

[acaciapalm]

I don't see what this has to do with my comment. I didn't say all men are sexist or all teams are sexist, just stated that there is safety in numbers.

You're lucky nobody said something racist about Asians when you were the only Asian. Otherwise, you would have been in the same situation. But that's it: luck. It could happen to anyone and then the workplace could turn hostile.

[stcredzero]

I'm not sure how much this has to do with quantity of x as opposed to quality of x.

Quantity matters. Everything is contextual. If one is in a "hypo-minority" situation, then one is more likely to stand out. Being unique can be nice, but being irrevocably marked as unique, with no respite can feel like being trapped. Being singled out is simply more likely if you are truly singular.

Like if a company is predominantly composed of white men, does adding a white female make it more diverse than adding a black man?

I think that very much depends on the people involved. So in this, you are right. But quantity does matter a lot.

[r00fus]

> I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism.

I don't think your situations are comparable. Women are ~50% of the population and sexual undertones have nothing to do with ethnicity, but everything to do with gender.

[acaciapalm]

Also, I think it is MUCH more likely for a team to have only one woman than only one Asian. From my experience working as a dev in the US, anyway.

At any rate, I've never been on a team that didn't have several Asians. But I've had many co workers tell me they've never worked with a woman before (which in itself is awkward to hear unprompted, haha).

Thanks for pointing out that race and sex are not comparable. It's true, they really aren't.

[BurningFrog]

You might be confusing sexuality and sexism.

[anon839]

I disagree. Some sexual undertones have to do with ethnicity because of stereotypes of Asian women etc.

[r00fus]

Not sure what such stereotypes you're talking about, but regardless where does your example not have to do with gender?

[FT_intern]

I'm sorry that happened but I don't think it's indicative of some trend in the industry.

I've been a minority almost my entire life. Most of the issues with being a minority are not really present on software engineering teams. The demographics are too widespread.

There is no in-group. I would estimate 50-60% of software engineers are immigrants. That group is further segmented by country of origin. Everyone is different from each other.

Country of origin transcends both gender and race in terms of shared experiences and commonalities. American born people of all races and gender are more likely to befriend each other than to befriend a person who speaks broken English.

This diversity on software engineering teams minimizes the effects of being different because everyone is different from each other.

Software engineers also tend to be more introverted and immigrants are more polite (due to unfamiliarity with American culture).

For people to make inflammatory comments and get away with it, they need to have allies and be part of an in-group. These prerequisites are much more difficult to fulfill as a software engineer.

Software engineering is one of the best professions to be a minority in.

[hibikir]

There is always an in-group, it's just a matter of which one. I have worked at places where I was part of the in-group, and places where I wasn't. Sometimes it was nationality. Others, the school you came in. The gender divide is not a big issue in some places, while in others I've ended up talking to HR about harassment that I saw in front of my own eyes. I've been the shoulder to cry on, literally, in one of those cases. And don't get me started with discrimination due to sexual orientation.

It's really easy to know when you are not part of the majority though: When you don't see any differences and everything looks cheery and happy, congratulations, you are not treated as a minority.

We can't really boats about the industry when we have 15% women and about under 10% African-American. I've worked at a place where we had a large architecture meeting: 25 architects, zero women. The company boasted 50-50 gender split, but with vert few exceptions, you could make a great guess of role and gender. Guess that men sitting in an engineering pod are developers or managers, and that women are either QA or systems analysts, and you'll get it right. The testers had the same CS background as the developers, except they were paid a good 30% less. The rest of the women came from recruiting and HR. You could also guess which department they worked on just by looks too.

I know four women that have dropped out of software engineering in the last year, just because the toll of being treated differently made them lose any love they had for the industry, and are now doing jobs that pay way less, but where they don't have to work twice as hard as a man to get half the recognition. One of them is rather unattractive by your typical standards. When she quit her last job, many people didn't even know she had been working there for years: She might as well have been socially invisible.

Maybe you've been very lucky in your career, and haven't seen the discrimination, or maybe you really are part of the in-group and don't know about it.

[colmvp]

> We can't really boats about the industry when we have 15% women and about under 10% African-American.

Disagree. We have amazing contributions from a variety of people from Europe, South America, and Asia. It's not perfect, and it should get better, but it's nothing to be ashamed about.

It's interesting how the NBA happily celebrates black culture and black people who represent their game despite the fact that they are overrepresented relative to the general population, but the tech industry basically never celebrates the contributions from a variety of immigrants and non-whites in its own industry.

[escherize]

And can't even safely mention whites.

[FT_intern]

This argument (or more specifically, personal accounts) doesn't really respond to the original argument about a high % of immigrants.

Why is there always an in-group?

What is the in-group of a place with:

- 10% Asian Americans

- 10% Indian Americans

- 10% various white European immigrants

- 15% Indian immigrants

- 20% Asian immigrants (14% Chinese, 4% Korean, 2% other)

- 25% white Americans

- 5% Black/Hispanic Americans

- 5% Black/Hispanic immigrants

(With 10% females spread among those race/country lines)

What I see happen is that the various groups separately cluster based on country of origin. None of the groups are dominant, so no one person (even a leader of a group) will feel comfortable making inflammatory remarks.

Many times everyone on the team is introverted and no groups form at all.

>Maybe you've been very lucky in your career, and haven't seen the discrimination, or maybe you really are part of the in-group and don't know about it.

Ad hominem? I've been a minority in the most formative years in places where being different is tough and I understand the difficulties. I contrast the experience and demographics of work with those years.

[nostrebored]

The ingroup there is pretty obvious: being a dude.

I don't know how that's even a question -- one group composes 90% of the workplace, and its a group that enjoys special privileges.

Racial discrimination and in-grouping isn't the only kind of in-group.

[sordina]

The point is valid, but this obviously puts organisations trying to recruit their first female employees in a bit of a pickle. For the benefit of the common good (getting more small businesses and startups to hire more women) it might be better to asses a business's desired trajectory rather than its current state... right?

[morgante]

Exactly.

I've definitely interviewed female candidates for a small startup where they decided not to proceed once they found out they'd be the first woman on the team. I certainly don't hold it against them, but it really does make increasing diversity a lot harder if nobody is willing to be the first one.

It's a great example of how hard it can be to change the trajectory of systems even when everyone earnestly works towards change.

[Eridrus]

Have you considered asking them to help you recruit another woman from among their connections for your other open positions?

I don't know how well it would work, but it's an idea...

[morgante]

At the time we were only hiring a single engineer, but that's definitely a good suggestion.

[tomp]

Well I guess it's a good thing you avoided a few very sexist candidates...

[acaciapalm]

I wish I could say I'm a perfect martyr for the feminist cause, but I'm not.

I'd rather have a happy and productive career than an ugly sexual harassment and wrongful termination suit.

[josephg]

Huh - I wonder if you could use that as leverage during pay negotiation.

"Oh, you don't have any other women on staff? You need to know that thats going to be sort of rough for me, in complicated gross ways. I'll still do it, but only if you pay me an extra 10% compensation pay on top of what you were otherwise going to pay me. (Which you can stop doing as soon as you hire another woman)."

[jschwartzi]

As a man, this would make me extremely uncomfortable for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which because it implies to me that you think all men are scummy creeps and that you need extra money to deal with us.

[danielheath]

That's a hell of a reach from what she said, to put it mildly. To justify your inference she would need to be asking for extra money for dealing with any men, ever.

[67726e]

I feel like that's just going to get them to retract their offer in a lot of cases.

[tomp]

Isn't it sexist to pay someone differently (more in this case) just because of their gender?

[sordina]

Completely agree. This stance clearly makes sense from any individual's perspective.

[SolarNet]

Yea that was an idea I got out of this that I think will take to heart, at the very least teams should have a couple of women in them, even if it might make one team all men (the 15% women in tech number is really annoying; the better solution would just be to have half of each team be women).

[koder2016]

You should've laughed to divert any suspicions. When someone makes a racist joke about me I chuckle and wait for my turn. Because I don't want to watch what I am saying all the time. He did not make an attack, he lowered his shield. And then suffered the consequences.

[acaciapalm]

Believe me, it really wasn't funny...

Like, it was violent and creepy and Elliot Rodgers-esque. I would have looked like a psycho to the other co workers if I laughed. As it stands, the offending co worker looked like a psycho.

(He got fired. But I was a bit scared for my safety.)

[dota_fanatic]

If it was violent, creepy, and reminiscent of a mass-murderer comment directed towards women, I would think it a good thing that people would suspect you were the one to stick up for women, seeing as you had the most to fear from such a hateful person. It's a good thing that at least one person reported them, since the unfortunate human norm is for a bystander to ignore those in need of help / defense / solidarity.

If "everyone assumed it was you" and then gave you "the side-eye" for the consequences of this nasty person's comment's getting reported, fired, then this seems like clear signal that that workplace was no good in that way and it's time to find friendlier waters.

How do you think this would have gone differently had there been two more female employees? The hateful one would have kept a tighter lid on their true personality? The side-eye would have been more them vs us, or again, left thought but not expressed?

Anyways, lack of diversity sucks.

[acaciapalm]

Not everyone was there for the comment and HR did not say what the comment was or who said it.

For 90% of my co workers, it was just "we all have sensitivity training for sexist comment reported to HR and only one woman, soooo..."

[kkirsche]

Lack of diversity doesn't suck assuming the company hired the best talent for the role. Diversity for the sake of diversity is horrible and makes you dislike the people for just being there